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xyzzysqrlOkay, my dear friends. My close friends. Gather around and gather in close, because what I have to say now is only for you, and for the eight or nine people who wander in from Livejournal at large every now and then, and for anyone who ever googles me for any reason ever. Because it's totally a secret.
I am something of an adventure game addict. Point-and-click-em-ups, the difficult stuff. Learned to read from text adventures, beat King's Quest as a tiny marketable child version of m'self, spent months working through Monkey Island and Last Crusade and Fate of Atlantis and whatnot. I've played adventure games most people have never heard of, first and third person, dialogue heavy and silent save for the "you can't do that" clunk. That's not a hipsterish smugface or anything, just fact. I have suffered and bled for puzzles. (Fricking code wheels.)
Like all addicts, however, I have been lazy and indulgent. There came a time a year or two back when I desperately needed some PUZZLES to click on. Anything would do. So I got on the internet and pirated a game I'd never -buy- obviously, because it was so utterly beneath me. Given this entry's subject line, you can likely guess: It was a Nancy Drew title. ... And then I got good and hooked. I felt remorseful. I promised myself, when there came a time I had the funds, I -would- pay for that game. It was a matter of honor.
So when the 20-pack Summer Sale Collection of Nancy Drew pointyclickies came up this year on Steam, I made a face of happy and made a noise like "hurrrdowant" and I bought that package. Now you know why I have too goddamn many video games: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL and also THE ABILITY TO FEEL EMOTIONS. Huff. Sigh. On the other hand, I now have several Nancy Drew games I've never played. Like THIS one! Now that the backstory is out of the way, I can make my shameful secret confession: I am -so totally pumped- about playing this game! Eeee, Nancy Drew you guys! Nancy Drew was -awesome- when I was a kid. She had her own car, she knew fucking everything, she got away with talking to adults like they were morons, and she solved every case not by luck or punching people out but by just plain BEING AWESOME. To Young Me, Nancy Drew was like Spider-Man except she didn't get punched, do much punching or wear a costume.
In retrospect I'm not sure why I wasn't buying these games from the start. My inner ten year old girl is clearly -super hype- about this. Moreso because I'm keeping this text file, to write down CLUES and STUFF.
Well... heck, let's get started then! It's MYSTERY TIME.
Starting up a new game gets me a "Welcome to my latest case!" from Nancy (NANCY DREW YOU GUYS) and a difficulty select. Now... I usually play these games on Easy, or the easiest mode available, because I like actually finishing what I start. Come on, though, look at all that crap I wrote up there puffing m'self up like a peacock or something. If I wrote all that and then told you guys I got a choice of "Senior Detective" or "Junior Detective" and I picked "Junior", I would have to LEAVE THE INTERNET IN DISGRACE. Get me a sombrero and some refried beans, 'cause you folks can call me Senor Detective.
Actually please don't. Don't actually do any of that.
Every Nancy Drew game starts basically the same way. "Dear Ned,". Ned Nickerson is Nancy's long-running guyfriend, and he's usually parked offscreen somewhere in the games so Nancy can use him as an infodump recepticle. Anyway, as the letter goes, one "Sally McDonald" is the renter of a lake house and also one of Nancy's friends, which means she is of course a weird-crap magnet. She called Nancy up and was all "NANCY. THAT THING YOU DO WITH THE SOLVING AND CRIMES. I NEEDS IT." and Nancy was like "Whoa okay." So she researched the house, which belonged to an olde-tymey gangster named Mickey Malone. Then she drove on down to Sally's place in her FAMOUS BLUE ROADSTER (I will always remember that Nancy drives a blue car. I don't know why I will remember this.) and horrors, a tree falls across the path just outside the cabin! She's trapped!
Also there is a note on the door basically saying "Nancy I had to go because creepy stuff happens at night. Call you from my car. Luv Sally." So right now this is looking, to MY TRAINED EYES, like a set-up. But Nancy would NEVER suspect a friend, so she settles in to wait.
The call doesn't take long to come in. Sally sounds relieved, happy to be out of the cabin, but shocked when she learns Nancy is stuck there. She offers the suggestion to call a local store owner for help, and then implores that Nancy "Get on the boat out by the dock and just go, go anywhere but there". Her celphone starts breaking up as she rants about DOGS and TEETH and MALONE and CLAWS and HOWLING. If the game weren't -called- "Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake", this might be marginally creepy here. Naturally I try to call her back at once, and naturally it goes straight to voice-mail. My eyes fall on the OTHER phone number in Nancy's pad: Bess Marvin.
Poor Bess. If Ned is Nancy's boyfriend, Bess is totally her girlfriend, and George 'Georgia' Fayne (Bess' cousin) is the third part of their girl power trio. Nancy, Bess and George are ESSENTIALLY the Powerpuff Girls. The thing is, when Nancy is working a case, I have access to her celphone. Because I love listening to those two/three chatter at each other, Bess gets a phone call roughly every forty seconds.
*ring*
"Bess? Hi, it's Nancy! I'm in a room now."
"Nancy? That's great, are there any clues..."
"BESS. This room has a CARPET in it."
"Oh, that's... a thing, Nancy. I gotta go..."
*click*
*ring*
"The carpet is green, Bess. This means something."
"...ah..."
"Can you put George on? I wanna tell her about the carpet."
And so on. Sometimes Bess will give me other people's phone numbers, I assume as a smokescreen to distract Nancy so she can use the restroom or get food or make a run for the state lines to escape. I promptly dial up Bess to see what's shaking. Bess knows it's Nancy RIGHT AWAY. She claims telepathy. George claims Caller ID. Anyway, I fill her and George in on the situation. They implore me: If anything creepy happens, phone them. Then run from it.
Ahahaha. Exactly HALF of that will happen, you two.
Anyway, it's dark, there's supposed to be creepy dogs in the woods... let's check around the cabin and then plunge out there! But this post is... uh, PRETTY LONG, so I'll save that for next entry.
I am something of an adventure game addict. Point-and-click-em-ups, the difficult stuff. Learned to read from text adventures, beat King's Quest as a tiny marketable child version of m'self, spent months working through Monkey Island and Last Crusade and Fate of Atlantis and whatnot. I've played adventure games most people have never heard of, first and third person, dialogue heavy and silent save for the "you can't do that" clunk. That's not a hipsterish smugface or anything, just fact. I have suffered and bled for puzzles. (Fricking code wheels.)
Like all addicts, however, I have been lazy and indulgent. There came a time a year or two back when I desperately needed some PUZZLES to click on. Anything would do. So I got on the internet and pirated a game I'd never -buy- obviously, because it was so utterly beneath me. Given this entry's subject line, you can likely guess: It was a Nancy Drew title. ... And then I got good and hooked. I felt remorseful. I promised myself, when there came a time I had the funds, I -would- pay for that game. It was a matter of honor.
So when the 20-pack Summer Sale Collection of Nancy Drew pointyclickies came up this year on Steam, I made a face of happy and made a noise like "hurrrdowant" and I bought that package. Now you know why I have too goddamn many video games: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL and also THE ABILITY TO FEEL EMOTIONS. Huff. Sigh. On the other hand, I now have several Nancy Drew games I've never played. Like THIS one! Now that the backstory is out of the way, I can make my shameful secret confession: I am -so totally pumped- about playing this game! Eeee, Nancy Drew you guys! Nancy Drew was -awesome- when I was a kid. She had her own car, she knew fucking everything, she got away with talking to adults like they were morons, and she solved every case not by luck or punching people out but by just plain BEING AWESOME. To Young Me, Nancy Drew was like Spider-Man except she didn't get punched, do much punching or wear a costume.
In retrospect I'm not sure why I wasn't buying these games from the start. My inner ten year old girl is clearly -super hype- about this. Moreso because I'm keeping this text file, to write down CLUES and STUFF.
Well... heck, let's get started then! It's MYSTERY TIME.
Starting up a new game gets me a "Welcome to my latest case!" from Nancy (NANCY DREW YOU GUYS) and a difficulty select. Now... I usually play these games on Easy, or the easiest mode available, because I like actually finishing what I start. Come on, though, look at all that crap I wrote up there puffing m'self up like a peacock or something. If I wrote all that and then told you guys I got a choice of "Senior Detective" or "Junior Detective" and I picked "Junior", I would have to LEAVE THE INTERNET IN DISGRACE. Get me a sombrero and some refried beans, 'cause you folks can call me Senor Detective.
Actually please don't. Don't actually do any of that.
Every Nancy Drew game starts basically the same way. "Dear Ned,". Ned Nickerson is Nancy's long-running guyfriend, and he's usually parked offscreen somewhere in the games so Nancy can use him as an infodump recepticle. Anyway, as the letter goes, one "Sally McDonald" is the renter of a lake house and also one of Nancy's friends, which means she is of course a weird-crap magnet. She called Nancy up and was all "NANCY. THAT THING YOU DO WITH THE SOLVING AND CRIMES. I NEEDS IT." and Nancy was like "Whoa okay." So she researched the house, which belonged to an olde-tymey gangster named Mickey Malone. Then she drove on down to Sally's place in her FAMOUS BLUE ROADSTER (I will always remember that Nancy drives a blue car. I don't know why I will remember this.) and horrors, a tree falls across the path just outside the cabin! She's trapped!
Also there is a note on the door basically saying "Nancy I had to go because creepy stuff happens at night. Call you from my car. Luv Sally." So right now this is looking, to MY TRAINED EYES, like a set-up. But Nancy would NEVER suspect a friend, so she settles in to wait.
The call doesn't take long to come in. Sally sounds relieved, happy to be out of the cabin, but shocked when she learns Nancy is stuck there. She offers the suggestion to call a local store owner for help, and then implores that Nancy "Get on the boat out by the dock and just go, go anywhere but there". Her celphone starts breaking up as she rants about DOGS and TEETH and MALONE and CLAWS and HOWLING. If the game weren't -called- "Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake", this might be marginally creepy here. Naturally I try to call her back at once, and naturally it goes straight to voice-mail. My eyes fall on the OTHER phone number in Nancy's pad: Bess Marvin.
Poor Bess. If Ned is Nancy's boyfriend, Bess is totally her girlfriend, and George 'Georgia' Fayne (Bess' cousin) is the third part of their girl power trio. Nancy, Bess and George are ESSENTIALLY the Powerpuff Girls. The thing is, when Nancy is working a case, I have access to her celphone. Because I love listening to those two/three chatter at each other, Bess gets a phone call roughly every forty seconds.
*ring*
"Bess? Hi, it's Nancy! I'm in a room now."
"Nancy? That's great, are there any clues..."
"BESS. This room has a CARPET in it."
"Oh, that's... a thing, Nancy. I gotta go..."
*click*
*ring*
"The carpet is green, Bess. This means something."
"...ah..."
"Can you put George on? I wanna tell her about the carpet."
And so on. Sometimes Bess will give me other people's phone numbers, I assume as a smokescreen to distract Nancy so she can use the restroom or get food or make a run for the state lines to escape. I promptly dial up Bess to see what's shaking. Bess knows it's Nancy RIGHT AWAY. She claims telepathy. George claims Caller ID. Anyway, I fill her and George in on the situation. They implore me: If anything creepy happens, phone them. Then run from it.
Ahahaha. Exactly HALF of that will happen, you two.
Anyway, it's dark, there's supposed to be creepy dogs in the woods... let's check around the cabin and then plunge out there! But this post is... uh, PRETTY LONG, so I'll save that for next entry.
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no subject
Date: 2012-08-04 11:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-04 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-04 06:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-04 06:35 pm (UTC)I probably will be writing up the -entire plot- though, as I play.
no subject
Date: 2017-01-08 03:49 am (UTC)Fun fact: the ghost dogs/cabin/lake general setting are reminding me of that one ghost dog episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark, which was probably the least scary Are You Afraid of the Dark episode I personally have seen. Like, that show ran the full spectrum from "Whoa okay this is TOO SCARY for my delicate young sensibilities I LITERALLY cannot watch this one *changes channel and cries in the corner*" to ":|" and I think their ghost dogs just about brought up the rear. I'm excited to see how these ones do!